Sail Away: How to Escape the Rat Race and Live the Dream

By Nicola Rodriguez

You long to escape the daily grind, buy a boat and sail away. This book tells you how to turn your dreams into a reality. There is practical advice on everything from choosing a boat to crossing oceans. You'll be guided through each step of the preparation before casting off on your adventure of a lifetime. There's information on everything the would-be blue water sailor needs to consider, including safety, communications, children, ocean passages and budgeting. _x000D_Learn about routes and destinations around Europe, the Caribbean, the Pacific and beyond to help you cruise the Mediterranean, cross the Atlantic or circumnavigate the world. Colour photographs and charts will inspire and inform in this essential guide for the 21st century blue water sailor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fernhurst Books Limited
• Release date: Dec 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781119952589

Nicola Rodriguez

Nicola Rodriguez dared to dream the impossible. She wanted to see the world with her family. She wanted to have her own adventure, a taste of paradise, and most importantly – freedom. Freedom from the demands of life, and time out to explore on every level. With careful planning (and the gift of yachting equipment), her dream came true, allowing her to travel, escape and explore the world by yacht for four years while raising her family.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Turning the Dream into Reality

Why would you want to make a sailing boat your home and cast off to venture beyond the horizon?

That’s what my husband and I did. We wanted to have our adventure, our taste of paradise, in this life, not in the next. So in 2002 we set sail and lived the life we’d always dreamed of. Our four-day stay in magical Bimini slipped to four weeks. We spent five weeks anchored off the beach at Freeman’s Bay, Antigua, one of the most beautiful anchorages in the world. Why? Because we loved it.

As a well-known pirate of the Caribbean once said: ‘What a ship is, what she really is . . . is freedom.’

Freeman’s Bay, English Harbour, Antigua, West Indies. One of the most beautiful anchorages in the Caribbean.

Freedom from the demands of work. Freedom from the daily grind of office politics and social one-upmanship, schedules, the normal, the ordinary, school term times, the school run. Freedom from traffic and parking restrictions. Time out to explore on every level. Time out for yourself and your partner. Your boundaries will become the horizons you sail over; your perceptions will change with the tides. Teacher, labourer, lawyer and chef will all merge into a sailor of seas.

How much would you give for perpetual summer? To turn the cold rain and grey clouds into sunshine and blue skies, not for days but for weeks or months in the Caribbean or the Pacific. And then perhaps having explored in T-shirt and shorts you may want to go further, to the cooler waters of higher latitudes. The world really is your oyster.

While escaping the humdrum is challenging and doesn’t mean a life of ease, even in the toughest times you’ll be in a place that most call heaven on earth. For weeks on end you’ll be somewhere that most people only visit for their precious fortnight’s holiday and you’ll have the luxury of not knowing which day it is, let alone which week. You’ll be cruising, dropping in and out of the tourists’ world as you wish, part local, part traveller.

Hawksbill in the Bahamas, 2002, or 2003 or 2004 or 2011.

Our story

I met John in July 2001 when I gatecrashed his party for top advertising clients in London’s Soho. On our second date he said he wanted to sail around the world one day, and asked me if I’d come too. John was in the process of buying a Beneteau Oceanis 311 Clipper anticipating coastal sailing for a few seasons. We named her Serafina in a force 10 gale. On our first sail, dolphins played around us, unusual off the Sussex coast. On our second sail on 5 November, in a force 3 with a harvest moon, we toasted hundreds of firework displays a mile off Sovereign Harbour. A few days later John proposed and we realised that the ‘one-day’ was now. But, we needed a Blue Water boat. We began an extensive search for a suitable yacht for our trip. The Beneteau was sold. In March 2002, the day after we found Moonshine, a Westerly Corsair, everyone in my department was made redundant. The redundancy money paid for the refit. We were married in May and sailed in July. 25,000 miles, eight years, two hurricanes and two sons later, I wrote this book.

As JRR Tolkien wrote, ‘Not all who wander are lost.’ One of the many joys of cruising is the unexpected pleasures – be it the thrill of discovering a stunning, uncrowded anchorage or the exhilaration of feeling free to go wherever you want. Freedom doesn’t mean release from stress, but it does mean stress on your own time, stress at your command. You will have to fix the boat, but you will be setting the agenda.

Deciding to go

So what does it take to sail over the horizon? The excuses and good reasons not to go are legion. In the end, it’s about focus, chutzpah and sheer bloody-mindedness. It’s a cliché but it’s true: you have to make a commitment to follow your dream. Book after book, blog after blog, you read that once the decision had been made, the following one, five or ten years were all about a focus on being able to cruise away, whether it’s in a homemade boat or on a yacht bought with hard-earned money. You need to hold on to the dream day by day and not allow yourself to be distracted or persuaded that it’s a mad idea.

Exploring the world from your own floating home allows for countless unforgettable achievements – those things you want to do before you die. It is remarkable having travelled thousands of miles to sail into Manhattan or under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Even crossing the English Channel and motoring down the Seine into Paris gives you a fantastic kick. Would you prefer to fly into Antigua and face the airport chaos or sail into English Harbour, one of the most beautiful anchorages in the world?

English Harbour, Antigua, West Indies.

The first sight of land from the sea after a three-week passage is intoxicating. Equally, be it the Isle of Wight or the continent of the Americas, as the land slips away again, so do perceived problems and issues. The fascinations and concerns of the everyday world become more and more ephemeral the further and longer you sail away.

Many people are happy with a predictable life, year after year, TV series after TV series, football season after football season – for them that’s life as it should be lived. For those who want to live a different life, it’s about watching Spain versus Germany with the locals in Mallorca or England versus France with the locals in Martinique. How about following the English cricket tour of the Windies under your own sail, island by island? Perhaps you won’t have all your family with you, but you can have your birthdays and Christmas on exquisite warm beaches, or spend New Year jumping around at Junkanoo, a carnival in the Bahamas. Every time you drop the lines there’s a buzz of anticipation about where you are and what’s next. You should be in control of your boat, but not necessarily in control of the life you’re leading. You’re looking for the new and unknown.

If that sounds like you, then this book will give you the information you need to make your life under sail a success. First, let’s look at what you need to think about and know before you go.

Siesta time, Balearics, Spain.

Practical issues

As with all very big adventures, it’s important to ask some fundamental questions, such as:

What makes you think you can sail a boat for a year and a day, and another, and another? Do you have the aptitude, the knowledge and the skills? Are you physicially and emotionally fit enough for the demands of life at sea?

What about your job? Do you take time out when you’re young and fit but risk your career in the process? Are you able to take a sabbatical, and if so for how long? How will you feel if you have an amazing time, only to return and find yourself working for a junior you once trained? Have you considered the effect that leaving your job will have on your identity? Or do you keep climbing the career ladder, hoping for promotion and good investments to buy you expensive holidays for now, and the dream later?

How are you going to pay for your travels? How much of your savings or inheritance can you spend? Would you be willing to go into debt?

What about your current home? If you own your house, are you going to rent it out while you’re away? If you come back early or for a visit, where would you stay? How long could you stay there before you and your hosts would be likely to fall out?

Do you want to go as a family or just the two of you? If you are taking the children, when do you take them out of school? Are you willing to educate them yourself? If they are very young, are you willing to look after them 24/7, day after day, month after month?

If you’ve waited until your retirement to sail away, will you cope? How good are you in high temperatures and high humidity with no air conditioning? Are you fit enough to climb in and out of dinghies every day? Will you want to return to see your grandchildren growing up? How willing are you to be ill or require medical attention far from home?

What plans have you made for living on land if you don’t take to living on board? Even if things do work out, will you feel at ease with your landlubber’s identity after a long time away at sea?

The folks back home

Obviously, as well as making the necessary practical arrangements for them, children, parents and possibly pets need to be cherished and cared for while you’re away. Luckily, communications via mobile telephone and email are increasingly good, even in remote places such as the Pacific, so you will be able to keep in touch.

Be prepared for negative reactions from some of those you leave behind. Not everyone will agree with your decision, nor will they be truly interested in your experiences. When you return home, whether for a visit or for good, people will listen for a few minutes and then begin to switch off, their eyes glazing over. You may have lost your connection with them because your experiences are so out of their world. People will eagerly tell you about their flotilla holiday, not realising that has as much to do with long-term cruising as rubber bands do with space flight.

One retired couple decided to leave the woman’s elderly mother, who had severe dementia, in a good care home. When the old lady died, the grieving daughter flew home to be greeted by unsympathetic siblings. The couple had been in a remote part of the western Caribbean and had endured a dreadful time finding a safe berth for the boat, securing flights and making an arduous journey to the airport. The siblings who had remained at home vented their grief in the form of long-felt resentment of their sister’s cruising lifestyle. They felt she had abandoned their mother, regardless of her condition and needs. They did not understand or care what stress on top of distress the couple had suffered en route home. They felt they deserved every mile of discomfort they had endured as penance for their selfishness.

Seraphim at anchor, Plana Cay, Outer Bahamas, on Easter Day.

Sometimes there will be news or pictures of a party or gathering that would have been fun to be at, but was not worth the disruption involved in flying home. At other times homesickness or a temporary disappointment with cruising can make you find excuses to come back. One skipper was unimpressed with his new partner’s trips home to mother their 19-year-old son who had just started at university.

A life change or a style of life?

There is a vast difference between those who are sailing away and changing their lifestyle completely, and those who continue to work and just take time out on their yacht. Which one are you? Think about how much you want to let go or, alternatively, how much you want to hold on to your career, or the reins of power if you are self-employed.

One workaholic executive who owned a superyacht with another wealthy friend came to deeply resent the fortune he was paying to maintain the boat and the crew, but without the benefits of lounging around his acres of teak deck. His friend viewed his investment differently and made time out from his hectic schedule to spend time indulging in what his hard work had brought him.

Some people argue that it’s better to have a partial experience rather than none. Others claim that a clean break is essential to focus on the new life and that you’re unlikely to fully grasp the cruising experience if you still have business interests at home.

A sad but true example is a successful businessman who set sail on a beautiful yacht, leaving his sons in charge of the thriving company. However, he did not want to let go completely and found himself being sucked back into running the firm. He flew back to the UK on business increasingly often and visits to his ocean-going yacht became rarer and shorter. The money wasn’t the problem, he just couldn’t let go. Unfortunately, a few years later the business failed, and he lost his boat as well.

A minority of high-powered business folk are able to manage their business from their yacht via wifi and satellite communication. They find that it works to their advantage that their employees never know quite where they are, or when they are online.

Unless you’re already retired, do remember to think about what you are going to do for a living when you come back. Anne Hammick, a veteran cruiser who wrote Ocean Cruising on a Budget, remarked that 20 years ago it was easier for people in their mid-30s to sail away because they had the security of knowing they could find a job on their return. Financial times may have changed and the jobs market may be less guaranteed, but many people face the additional problem not of securing a job, but of adjusting to sitting in an office on their return after the freedom of a boat.

Do you have the skills?

It can take a lifetime to learn how to sail. However, you can learn the basics in just a few months. If you don’t know how to read a chart, give coordinates (longitude and latitude), or understand that CD can stand for chart datum, then it’s advisable for you to go on a course before you go off round the world.

Courses

In the UK, sailing schools offer the Royal Yachting Association (www.rya.org.uk) courses from Start Yachting to Competent Crew, through Day Skipper, Coastal Skipper, Yachtmaster Offshore and Ocean. Don’t forget that you can interview the school to find out about its staff and their teaching methods. You’ll learn much more if you enjoy the company of the instructors. The UK Sailing Academy (www.uksa.org) is one of many organisations offering a 23-week course aimed at turning out fully qualified skippers with Yachtmaster tickets.

In the USA, a good place to start is US Sailing (www.ussailing.org), based in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. There you can find guidance to information and training all over the USA. The Seven Seas Cruising Association, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was set up for cruisers using power and sail; you can find more information at www.ssca.org.

In Australia, Yachting Australia (YA; www.yachting.org.au) offers training schemes and courses, including those from the RYA. It also sells publications and provides information on regattas such as Sail Sydney in December in the Sail Down Under series (www.saildownunder.org.au).

In New Zealand, the Coastguard (www.coastguard.co.nz) runs Boating Education (www.cbes.org.nz), with courses from beginner to professional.

There are also International Sailing Federation (ISAF; www.sailing.org) qualifications, which can be taken as a couple or crew.

If you’re new to skippering, new to your boat or feel that the first leg of your journey is too much of a challenge, you could ask an experienced friend, or even hire a professional skipper and crew, to sail with you for a few weeks. You could view this as an investment, as an RYA-approved skipper can teach you about your boat and assist you in gaining your RYA Coastal Skipper or Yachtmaster certificate. Some new boat owners whose spouses don’t want to or can’t spare the time to be actively involved find two or three friends to learn with. Seek instruction, use your common sense, and also accept that you will learn quickly along the way.

Books and blogs

Some of the most knowledgeable seamen have no qualifications at all. A piece of paper is not an absolute and experience can be just as valuable. There are also scores of books detailing how to be a good skipper and crew.

Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted either. If you’re not sure where to sail to first, you could research destinations in books or on the internet, or read the experience of others in books or blogs.

At the end of this book is information on a selection of pilot guides that provide solid information on various destinations, offering expert advice on entry into ports, anchorages, marinas and much else besides. They cover your journey from the English Channel to Gibraltar, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Caribbean (east and west), the United States and Canada, the Panama Canal, the Pacific, Australasia and the Far East.

For answers to a wide variety of yachting questions, and to feel part of the online sailing community, it’s worth joining a sailing forum, such as those at Yachting and Boating World, www.ybw.com.

The Cruising Association (www.cruising.org), based in Lime House Basin, London, provides information to sailors considering short- or long-term cruises. Its illustrated talks, meetings and the members themselves are a fount of experience and information. The headquarters houses an extensive nautical reference library of over 10,000 volumes, and the organisation publishes a comprehensive handbook containing chart plans of harbours and anchorages, with sailing directions for the whole of the British Isles. The CA also runs RYA courses and a Crewing Service, which assists skippers looking for crew and vice versa.

Or for a glimpse of how the rich and famous live, take a look at the Superyacht Services Guides to the Mediterranean and Caribbean (www.superyachtservicesguide.com). As well as inspiring you, they will give you useful information to ground your dream.

How long and how far?

Do you actually want to go round the world? How much of your life are you prepared to invest? A circumnavigation can take 18 months on a World Rally, or 18 years at your own pace. Sir Francis Drake in the Golden Hind took two years, ten months ‘and some odd daies beside’. In 1898 Captain Joshua Slocum completed a solo circumnavigation of 46,000 miles in three years, two months and two days. In 2008 Francis Joyon took the world record for a trimaran in 57 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes and 6 seconds; in the same year Michael Desjoyeaux gained the monohull record in the Vendee Globe in 84 days, 3 hours and 9 minutes.

Many people who have completed a circumnavigation recommend eight years, which enables you to explore on land as well as taking trips home and allowing time for maintenance – and more maintenance. It also offers you the opportunity to take a berth for at least three winters, whether in New Zealand, Australia, the USA or Europe.

You may decide to opt for participation in a rally, on which there is more in Chapter 8. There are rallies that, for a price, can take you all the way around the world in 16 or 18 speedy months. There are also rallies for shorter distances, such as from the UK across the Bay of Biscay to northern Spain or Portugal. There are others that cross oceans, from the Canaries to the West Indies, through the Western Atlantic between the Caribbean and the USA, from the Pacific Islands south to Australia, from Australia through Indonesia, and so on into the Red Sea. Although you will be sailing by yourselves and you may feel alone, you will be sailing in company, even if the closest yacht is 100 miles away.

Blue Water Rally Antigua

Cruising authority Jimmy Cornell, whose books World Cruising Handbook and World Cruising Routes are absolute necessities for long-term cruisers, has a website, www.noonsite.com, that is full of information, including a comprehensive list of rallies around the world.

As a taster, you could attend one of the free seminars by the World Cruising Club, or the New Blue Water Rallies held during various boat shows. They cover long-term sailing, giving information on the Atlantic and world rallies. They also suggest ways to raise money for your boat and equipment plus costs and routes. Previous rally participants speak of their experiences, and it is an easy way to gather information comparatively inexpensively.

For those who are serious about sailing away, once a year in March the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) holds a more comprehensive, two-and-a-half-day ocean cruising seminar, for which there is a cost. These are run in the UK and Annapolis, Maryland. The New Blue Water Rally run similar in-depth events for committed participants.

If you don’t want to join an organised rally, you can be sure that if there is a route that has to be travelled at a particular time of year because of the winds – for example crossing the Atlantic in December because that is when the easterly winds blow you across – then there will be dozens of other boats with which you can form an informal rally. Local knowledge or cruising associations will give you good advice. Before you depart, check out whether your local yacht club has reciprocal arrangements with yacht clubs abroad, or perhaps join a club that has international connections.

The Ocean Cruising Club (www.oceancruisingclub.org) has a mentoring scheme that pairs potential blue-water sailors with experienced club members who can advise on all aspects of preparation.

The course of numerous circumnavigators has been changed by the piracy situation in Somalia and the Indian Ocean, which led to the kidnapping of a British couple, the Chandlers, a grim tale that ended after 388 days of captivity in their release in November 2010 and, the deaths of four Americans on SV Quest off India in February 2011.

Some cruisers remain in the Caribbean and during their first hurricane season head north to the USA, in the following hurricane season travelling further north to Canada. Alternatively they explore the western Caribbean, for example Colombia and the San Blas Islands (near Panama) or the ABC Islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, the Lesser Antilles).

For those transiting the Panama Canal, some make an extended Pacific Circuit over two or three years. During the cyclone season, they stay in Australia or New Zealand, then return to the Pacific islands. A few remain in the cyclone belt, for example Fiji. After exploring the Pacific islands, rather than sailing via Malaysia through the Indian Ocean, some ship their boat home from Australia or New Zealand, which is an expensive option. Others continue to India and ship the boat from there.

Two young adventurers, Peter and Katharine bought and kitted out a 38-foot yacht in New Zealand. They sailed to the Solomon Islands, through the Federated States of Micronesia, the Philippines and Japan, up and round to Vancouver. They then trucked the boat from Vancouver to eastern Canada, and sailed her home back to Spain across the Atlantic.

For those who really want to complete their circumnavigation, it is still possible to do so by sailing the ‘old’ way, around South Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. It is widely agreed that going via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal is not an option while the high levels of piracy continue.

Whichever way you go, it is important – and I repeat this for good reason – not to be in too much of a hurry. Weather, boat maintenance, bureaucratic delays, commitments at home, discovering somewhere gorgeous and wanting to stay longer or an unexpected fiesta – all of these can change your itinerary. Don’t allow an artificially imposed deadline to deprive you of potential opportunities.

A reluctant partner

Most blue-water boats are crewed by a couple. But what can you do when one partner is set on sailing away and the other does not want to follow? Negotiate? Cooperate? Go it alone? Stay and be resentful?

Both a reluctant spouse and a sailor who will not take no for an answer are challenges to the relationship. For 20 years, one spouse firmly believed that her husband would never get it together to sail away, but then he did. It caused a deep rift, which they finally, after much trial and travail, partially accommodated by spending half their time ashore and half on the boat.

There are ways of making the situation work. Numerous spouses or partners and children fly out to the Caribbean in late November to celebrate and enjoy time on the boat that their partners have sailed across the Atlantic. Or you could follow the example of one crew of wives who had sailed for years with their husbands, who decided to have a sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves ocean crossing, which proved a huge success.

Problems arise if the reluctant partner wants to meet the boat at regular intervals for a couple of weeks. This can cause stress for both: it puts pressure on the sailor to reach the destination (often risking a rough passage to arrive in time), and on the spouse to put their life on hold and make the journey to the boat. Does the boat remain in one place and the couple take shore excursions? Do they sail for a short time, with